The Emperor of Ocean Park (52 page)

“I’m sure he’s fine, Shirley,” I murmur, and she shrugs and tries to smile.

I smile back as best I can. The pain in my ribs is less, but the stitches in my cheek itch terrifically. Stuart Land turns out to be away for a few days—in Washington, no less—so I have been unable to upbraid him for his efforts to sabotage Marc Hadley, if, indeed, Stuart is the one who is doing it. The stranger with the voluptuous voice has not called back with any further reassurances, but I no longer sense that I am being followed. Were things otherwise, I suppose I would have skipped the party.

I am among the last of the guests to arrive. Marc and Dahlia Hadley are already here, as are Lynda Wyatt and her sleepy husband, Norm, the architect. And crafty old Ben Montoya, Lynda’s strong right hand, whose wife, like mine, is substituting for a babysitter sick with flu. Lem Carlyle and
his
wife are expected a little later, after their daughter’s ballet recital. Four of the most powerful members of the faculty, plus me. Shirley was my student ten years ago in the first torts class I ever taught. She is three years away from a tenure vote, but she already knows whose good opinions matter. And she is sufficiently street-wise to understand that evaluations of her scholarship, no matter how we try to fight it, will always be influenced, at least a little, by how much the evaluators like her as a person.

Three guests have no direct university connections. My sometime counselor, Reverend Dr. Morris Young, is accompanied by his quiet wife, Martha, who is nearly as pudgy as he is—quiet, that is, outside of church, for her voice is the loudest, if not perhaps the best, in the choir, which sings all over the state. The other is rail-thin Kwame Kennerly, a shamelessly calculating politico with prematurely thinning hair and a magnificent goatee, along with a reputation as a rabble-rouser, implicated but never quite caught in several municipal scandals, who currently serves, as Kimmer likes to say, as the mayor’s special assistant in charge of keeping the minority community domesticated, although his job title reads “deputy chief of staff.” He is also, I realize as he slips his arm around her slim waist, Shirley’s boyfriend. And it occurs to me that Shirley is strengthening her ties not only with the most influential professors at the law school, but with two of the most influential figures in the city’s black community.

In short, she is fitting in; I, her ex-teacher, beam.

Kwame Kennerly, standing right behind Shirley with a wineglass in his hand, is quite rude as Shirley introduces me, presumably because he blames me for being my father’s son, an attitude I frequently encounter from activists of the left. (Those on the right are always in a great hurry to shake my hand, with as little reason.) I often see Kwame’s name in the
Clarion,
for he is one of those rising politicians who manage to be everyplace at once, but I have never met him. He is a long, sinewy man whose wide, blinking eyes disagree with you before you have opened your mouth. For this occasion, perhaps because Shirley lives on the water, he is sporting a navy blazer with brass buttons even though it is out of season, the sort of offense against which my mother used to rage. As if for balance, he wears a round hat of bright orange kente cloth. The riot of color—the hat, the blazer, his dark skin, his ebon beard—is likely to be of quite intimidating effect on the white liberals present. If he feels out of place he is determined not to let on.

Shirley Branch lives in a sprawling condominium complex fronting on Elm Harbor’s narrow and seaweed-clogged beach. Her one-story unit is not very large: a bedroom that apparently doubles as her study, a kitchen the size of a closet, a single bathroom, and a long area that does duty as both living room and dining room, although the dining table, which seats twelve, takes up half the space. For the same money (so she has told me more times than I can remember), she could have bought a three-bedroom townhouse on the other side of the complex, but she
would not have had her spectacular view of the water. “I don’t need much space,” she likes to say, “because it’s only just me and Cinque.” Cinque, I should explain, is Shirley’s third dog of the same name, stretching all the way back into college: she makes sure we all know she selected the appellation long before Steven Spielberg made it famous.

To sit in Shirley’s condo, to gaze out the glass doors, across the balcony, to beach and smooth black water not fifty yards away, is almost to be transported back to Oak Bluffs.

Almost.

Shirley is a slim, flat-footed woman with a long, sad face and prominent teeth—what we used to call a horsey face when I was a child. Her eyes are a little bit too sincere, her flip hairdo is a little bit too pressed, her movements are a little bit too frenetic: even as a student, she had a tendency to overdo. Her work is principally about race, and she is determinedly, aggressively, almost palpably leftish. To hear Shirley tell it, no problem facing America or the world has any cause but white racism. Her mind is keen and energetic, she loves to write, but her scholarship lacks, I suppose, a certain subtlety, an attention to nuance, studied consideration of alternatives—she is, in a word, pigheaded, which is probably one reason we almost decided not to hire her. Marc Hadley led the opposition.

I wonder whether Shirley knows that.

I wander into the area that serves as both living room and dining room—sofa and loveseat at one end, glass-topped dining-room table at the other—and find Marc already holding forth, for he can no more resist an audience than the press can resist a scandal. Shirley shrugs in what might almost be apology as she hangs my coat in the crowded closet by the front door. Lynda Wyatt smiles merrily as I enter, raising her glass in ironic salute: she does
try
to like me, I must give her that. Marc’s greeting is so perfunctory that it is really a dismissal, but he is busy lecturing, into it now, tweedy arms pumping madly as he entertains the guests with his latest theory. Gregarious Dahlia does her best to make up for his rudeness, hugging me like a long-lost brother and asking after my family. Old Ben Montoya, scrawny yet still strong, puts a powerful hand on my shoulder and whispers that he heard I’d been arrested. I turn and glare, not at Ben, but at Shirley, who grins nervously and shrugs as if to say,
It’s not my fault—I don’t start rumors, I just spread them.

My gaze finally settles on Marc himself, my wife’s rival, a man to whom I once felt reasonably close: Brother Hadley, as Dear Dana Worth
likes to call him, or Young Marc, as the mischievous Theo Mountain prefers, for Marc possesses the kind of presence that inspires facetiousness. He smells, as always, of the rather pleasant raspberry tobacco he favors, for a battered old pipe is one of his many affectations. He pays no attention to the state’s recently enacted law forbidding smoking in the common areas of office buildings, having already decided for himself that it is unconstitutional, and nobody seems ready to challenge him, so the pipe travels with him everywhere around Oldie, although I notice he has not lit it at Shirley’s home. Marc is esteemed, quite properly, as one of the best brains on the faculty, a reputation, it seems, which justifies his failure to cut or even comb the gray-blond hair that falls past his ears, as well as his failure to shave more than once or twice a week, or to put on a tie, or to polish his shoes. He teaches jurisprudence and he teaches criminal law and he teaches learned seminars on the lives of the great judges and the coming death of law itself. Students are in awe of him. Most of his colleagues admire him. Some of us like him. Despite his ego, he is a kind man, always willing to give of his time and talent to those just starting out, and would be a considerable academic star but for the single failing I mentioned earlier: he simply does not write. His scholarly reputation rests not only on his single book—
The Constitutional Mind,
published almost twenty years ago—but on a single scintillating chapter of the book, Chapter Three, always written that way, capitalized, sometimes with no further citation:
But Hadley’s Chapter Three has already refuted that argument,
a sympathetic scholar might contend. In the famous Chapter Three, Marc presented what is commonly accepted as the best analysis ever of Benjamin Cardozo’s judicial style, and used it to present a critique of constitutional theory that remains in vogue today. Even Dana Worth, who despises Marc, concedes in her sober moments that she knows of no book as influential—no chapter as influential—written by a legal scholar in the past half-century. The book was a blistering attack on what has come to be called judicial activism, written by a professed liberal, but one who calls himself old-style, preferring what he calls the democratic liberalism of grass-roots organizing to the bureaucratic liberalism of litigation and legislation.

A dazzling thinker and fine teacher, my former friend Marc Hadley but I hope he remains a law professor.

At last I tune in Marc’s lecture. He is talking, as usual, too fast, but I capture the gist. “You see, if
Griswold
is correct—if decisions about birth control are to be made by women and their doctors—then marriage
itself is obsolete. I mean
constitutionally
obsolete. Just look at the findings of history and anthropology and you will discover that Freud turns out to have been right all along. Defenders of traditional marriage, especially those who argue that the marital relationship is somehow
natural,
point out that it exists in some form in just about every culture we have ever discovered. But what does that prove? Only that every culture has faced the same problem. Marriage evolved to solve the problem of how society would cabin the human urge to reproduce, which is the strongest urge humans possess, except for the urge among the weak-minded to invent supernatural beings to worship because they’re so afraid of dying.” A chuckle to soften the blow he believes he has dealt. Then he resumes. “You see, marriage is, historically, about nothing but reproduction and economics—that is, children and money. Married couples bear and raise children. The marital unit earns and consumes and acquires property. That’s it. All the rest of marriage law is surplusage. But now, with the evolution of technology and of culture, reproduction is no longer a matter of marriage. Unmarried women reproduce and there is no social sanction. Married women decline to reproduce and there is no social sanction. And not only is there no social sanction—there is a constitutional right. So, you see, we have this area of law that is built entirely on a social understanding that no longer exists. Once severed from reproduction, marriage becomes irrational. The law of marriage, then, is not reasonably related to any legitimate state purpose, which is the fundamental standard that any statute must meet under the Constitution. And there we have it. Marriage law is unconstitutional.”

He stops and looks around the cramped room as though awaiting applause.

Everybody is quiet. Marc looks pleased, perhaps imagining he has so impressed us that we are too awestruck to answer. I cannot speak for anybody else, but I am silent because I am considering whether to ask my doctor for a hearing test: I do not believe I could possibly have heard all this nonsense right. Marc will never write any of this down, and this is where his block disserves him: it seems to have made him reckless, for the fact that nothing he says will be recorded in some permanent medium will allow him, if ever asked, to deny his words, to insist his argument was misinterpreted, or to claim to have been engaging in mere speculation. Marriage as unconstitutional! I wonder if the White House is privy to this mad theory, if it is one of the tales that
Stuart has passed along—assuming that it is Stuart who is trying to sabotage him, for I have yet to track him down. I wonder how it would play in the press. (Not that I would ever talk to a reporter, but Marc has enemies. For instance, I could tell Dana Worth about Marc’s idea, and she would have no compunction about sharing it with as many journalists as she and Alison can find in their digital pocket planners.)

Marc continues.

“I do not say that private institutions, such as religious organizations, cannot, if they so choose, continue to perform their quaint ceremonies and announce to the faithful that this or that couple, of whatever description, is married in the sight of their particular God. But that is just an exercise of their basic religious freedom, guaranteed by the First Amendment. The point is that the state should not be involved in any way, whether by licensing these so-called marriages, or by granting particular state benefits to those who enter into them, or by purporting to decide in the place of these private institutions how and whether the marriages end.
Griswold
tells us that reproduction is not the state’s business. Therefore, marriage is not the state’s business.”

Ben Montoya, the great liberal, winks at me, a bemused grin on his face. He is Marc’s occasional sparring partner, for they are very much on opposite sides of such decisions as
Roe v. Wade.
(Marc would say he is personally pro-choice but believes the state has the authority to disagree.) Tonight, however, Ben does not argue with Marc. Neither does Lynda Wyatt, although she is standing right next to him. Lynda in her day has taught both family law and constitutional law and thus might be able to correct a few of Marc’s errors, but she is looking down at the sea-green carpet. I have never understood this effect that Marc has on people. Kwame Kennerly, who has given much of his considerable energy to encouraging marriage among the young African American men of the inner city, most of whom seem to have forgotten how it is done, looks furious. On the other hand, he remains a relative newcomer to the town of Elm Harbor, still building his political base, and is not quite ready to challenge a representative of the hated and envied university, especially one who raises so much money for Democratic candidates. Dr. Young looks troubled, but not intimidated. He shakes his head a few times, his fleshy lips pursed in disapproval. He does not say a word. I have the impression that he is biding his time, letting Marc punch himself out: the rope-a-dope. As for me, well, I would not dream of opening my mouth; so I content myself with wishing Dana were here
to shut Marc up. Norm Wyatt alone has the impertinence to roll his eyes in open disbelief, but he feels about the law faculty roughly the same way that Kimmer does.